Building Capability with Transformation Design

Lean Change Management is focused on helping organizations develop capability with respect to understanding and managing change. Traditional approaches are focused on big-plan-up-front thinking and typically are run change managers or consultants. Lean Change Management is one approach for moving the slider away from plan-driven approaches and more towards feedback-driven approaches through focusing on 2 simple principles:

You cannot control change through planning alone

Involving the people affected by the change in the design of the change reduces resistance

1) Thanks for taking the time to meet with me Clemens, tell me a bit about your background.

Clemens Frowein

For more than 15 years I’m dedicated to help and support corporations and organizations in their ability to orientate, to enhance performance, to innovate and to change. I would call myself an OD professional with passion for lively interaction with my clients. Two years ago I founded HLP entwicklungspartner together with 8 partners. Our dream and vision is a new model for consulting, bringing senior professional expertise in search for high impact interventions. We don’t sell consulting services and we don’t rely on juniors; we strictly live from what we call our “relationship capital” and mouth to mouth recommendation. We are an open model, joining with consultants from outside to provide the optimal expertise for our client in the mandates. With that approach we are able to performed large scale transformations that really impact. We strongly believe that this is a very promising model for management consulting in the future.

2) how did you get started working on Transformation Design?

In fact I was working for some years with the Business Model Canvas from Alex Osterwalder in strategy projects with remarkable results. I love the spirit and way of collaboration and of design thinking. One year ago I discussed with my partners if and how this approach could be applied in change projects. We were more and more in doubt of classic change management approaches as they are very often not delivering sufficient results and in highly dynamic environment. We created at first the Transformation Design Canvas – looks easy but it took us weeks to build it. The most challenging part was to simplify the structure and language so that its usable also for non- professionals. Once we hold the canvas in our hand we started to work with it in client projects. The impact and acceptance was fantastic.

The Transformation Canvas

3) what did you learn while developing this framework?

For me the most striking experience was that reframing change management with lean, agile, design thinking, gamification opens an entire new universe. Here’s an example: We started a large transformation program last year with a mayor telecom company. The executive board worked on the transformation with a completely new quality of dialogue – they set targets, expectations and the frame for the change. We then cascaded the transformation in over 300 teams – they were asked to design their transformation based on the frame of the board. The dynamic nature of this process was outstanding; the level of trust and engagement was really making a difference. This change project is seen as the best ever in that company.

As OD professionals we used to take for granted that only we consultants are able to understand and create suitable change processes and architectures. It was difficult for us to challenge our own role and to let go. We learned that managers and staff are very well capable of discussing, understanding and designing a transformation process. We don’t think that consultants are obsolete, but we feel a bit of a new humbleness.

4) Which parts of your framework have clients latched onto right away? And where did they resist?

The term Transformation Design seems to be very obvious for our clients. I now propose TD as part of every project I run and often clients find this soon the most important part of the journey. Our clients love to use design thinking for this field. One manager told me that he never really understood change management; that it always felt like a fuzzy gray zone and never was really inspiring, bringing up feelings like anxiety, resistance – change was more a problem. His experience with TD showed him that change can be a creative, collaborative process, experiencing positive emotions with colleagues.

In some cases our clients found that the canvas was too much at once, too many fields, too big. We learned that the TD canvas is more a principle that a fixed framework. The canvas can be customized by leaving fields out or it is possible to change titles of fields. This was really a process of understanding what the core of TD is and that it’s not helpful to see it as a standard with copyright.

5) What’s next for Transformation Design?

We had unbelievable sessions in the last weeks. We worked with Andreas Erbe from Launchlabs on the question what can be learned from Customer Experience Design (CX) and Human Centered Design (HCD) for our TD approach. We developed together several concepts. One is the Transformation Experience Journey to better understand the emotional curves and to design specific interventions for the journey. Another one is the concept of Transformation Persons (T-Persons) were we apply the personas segmentation approach to better understand the different segment of people affected by a change. For us this is revolutionary staff and we are burning here.

We decided to write a book and we will launch a blog and hub for Transformation Design in the next weeks. We really hope that the concept will inspire consultants and managers. Our experience gives us the feeling that TD could become a great approach and that a growing community is thinking and working in this direction.

6) Thank you so much Clemens, I’m looking forward to the book!

You’re welcome! – C. Frowein.

Resources and More Information

I began my career as a web developer when Cold Fusion roamed the earth. Over the following years, I moved into management, Agile Coaching and consulting. The bumps and bruises I collected along the way helped me realize that helping organizations adopt Agile practices was less about the practices, and all about change.
In 2008 I attended an experiential learning conference (AYE) about how people experience change and since then, I’ve been writing, and speaking, all over the world about helping organizations discover more effective practices for managing organizational change.